Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1356-9325 (Print) 1469-9575 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjla20

The Spiral of the Snail: Searching for the

Documentary – An Interview with Joao Moreira
Salles

Edgardo Dieleke & Gabriela Nouzeilles

To cite this article: Edgardo Dieleke & Gabriela Nouzeilles (2008) The Spiral of the Snail:
Searching for the Documentary – An Interview with Joao Moreira Salles , Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies, 17:2, 139-153, DOI: 10.1080/13569320802228005

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569320802228005

Published online: 23 Jul 2008.

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Edgardo Dieleke and
Gabriela Nouzeilles

THE SPIRAL OF THE SNAIL: SEARCHING

FOR THE DOCUMENTARY – AN
INTERVIEW WITH JOAO MOREIRA
SALLES1
Brazilian film director Joao Moreira Salles has compared his trajectory as a documentary
filmmaker to the paradoxical shape of a snail: ‘I am at the center of the snail, and as my career
progresses, I get closer and closer to myself.’2 In the interview that follows, Moreira Salles
returns to the image of the inward spiral as a graphic way of visualizing his artistic journey.
The image resonates as even more truthful today, after the success of the extraordinary
Santiago (2007), Moreira Salles’s most recent and experimental documentary.
Many critics have declared Santiago one of the best Latin American documentaries of
the last decade. In his enthusiasm for the film, film critic Jean Paul Bernardet has gone so far
as to include it in his international short list of ‘filmes-faróis’, in the company of
documentary masterpieces such as Eduardo Coutihno’s Cabra Marcado para Morrer (1985),
Matthias Müller’s Home Stories (1991), and Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik (1992). Santiago
not only traces the director’s artistic journey from the deceiving straightforwardness of
realism to the experimental explorations of the avant-garde, but also dramatizes the striking
transformations the documentary genre has experienced as such. Santiago encourages such
a reading by exhibiting the conditions of its own production. It takes original footage from
a failed documentary and turns it into the successful story of its impossibility through
editing. Constructing something new out of the ruins of a film, Santiago offers a radical
re-reading of unedited material, while contrasting two types of filmmakers, each
representing a different way of approaching the documentary’s primary subject.
Santiago began in 1992 as a traditional documentary portrait of Santiago Badariotti
Merlo, a colourful butler who had worked in residence for Moreira Salles’s parents at a
time when the family enjoyed a privileged and influential position within the political and
cultural life of Rio de Janeiro, in the 1950s and 1960s. An eccentric character, for years
Santiago spent most of his free time compiling information and putting together the
histories of royal dynasties from ancient to modern history. The film’s original black-and-
white footage consisted almost exclusively of Santiago acting out heavily directed scenes
in his kitchen and bathroom, or by his bookshelves, showing off the neatly organized
30,000 pages of his unpublished works about illustrious families. Frustrated with the lack
of direction of the project, Moreira Salles eventually abandoned the film, putting it aside
for 13 years. Finally, in 2005, he returned to the original footage and edited it, adding a
voiceover and a first-person narration. From being an inquisitive and seemingly
uncomplicated film about Santiago, the documentary became an extended meditation on
the relationship between memory, loss and filmmaking.

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 August 2008, pp. 139-153
ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569320802228005
140 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

FIGURE 1 In Entreatos (2004), Moreira Salles captured the private, minor events in Lula
da Silva’s first successful campaign for the presidency of Brazil.

The two versions of Santiago point to two strikingly different stages in Moreira
Salles’s slow maturation and exploratory journey as film director. By 2005, he had
already exhausted and excelled in all the formats available to the documentary genre,
exploring all sorts of subjects, from the geographic to the cultural and the political.
After four successful TV series – China, o império do centro (1987), América (1989), Blues
(1991), and Futebol (1998) – he began to make a name for himself with the release of
Notı́cias de uma guerra particular (1999), a path-breaking documentary on street violence
and the police war on narcotraffic in Rio de Janeiro, co-directed with Kátia Lund. In
2002, during one of the most remarkable presidential campaigns in Brazil’s political
history, Moreira Salles adopted the formal principles of direct cinema and shot Entreatos
(2004), following the popular candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva throughout Brazil
with the purpose of recording the inner world of campaigning. Finally, in 2003, he
switched his focus of attention yet another time and released Nelson Freyre, a film on the
reclusive Brazilian piano virtuoso. Through this series of films, Moreiras Salles follows
the spiral of a snail, as he slowly approaches the core of an inner self. The questioning of
realistic naivety, however, should not make us conclude that what awaits us at the end
of the series is the exaltation of a romantic subjectivity. What Santiago proposes is,
rather, cinema as metaphysical meditation. This is not necessarily a cinema that seeks to
discuss metaphysical themes; it means – in the words of Nancy – ‘cinematic
metaphysics, cinema as the place of meditation, as its body and its realm, as the taking-
place of a relation to the sense of the world’.3 Santiago gives evidence of the existence
of a look through which a world can give back to itself its own reality and the truth of
its enigma as the result of an encounter.
***
 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAO MOREIRA SALLES 141

ED/GN: Santiago, your latest film, began as a project that was interrupted
and taken up again after a lapse of 13 years. What for you would be the
fundamental difference between the finished film and the initial project?
And, how does the comparison reflect on the fact that the actual version
could also be said to be unfinished?
Joao Moreira Salles: Thirteen years ago I was a documentary filmmaker of a very
different kind. I think the basic difference, in a word, is control. I believed then that to
film was to control the environment. You control everything, the light, the frame, and,
principally, you control your characters. With time, I became more interested in those
documentaries that don’t know exactly how to control the environment,
documentaries that incorporate chance. Documentary filmmakers who incorporate
chance go out into the world without knowing beforehand what they will do; they give
themselves over to reality.
But, back then I was already making documentaries, and those earlier films were
completed. I’m not certain why this project didn’t immediately find completion, but I
have a few ideas. The first is that there already existed, even if unconsciously, what I
would later feel with great clarity: a lack of faith in the possibility of making a film about
a definite subject. In documentary there is this idea that there exists a readymade
subject who is rounded, stable and always constant. The task of the documentary
filmmaker would thus be to capture that platonic essence, so to speak, and present it to
the world. This is Nanook (Robert Flaherty), to use the example of the first
documentary. I don’t believe in that kind of documentary any more. The second reason
is that, at the time, I didn’t see in the material what I came to see later, its richest part,
which was my relationship with Santiago, the fact that I too was a character in the film.
At the time I was thinking of making a film in which I didn’t appear. Thirteen years later
I realized that my interventions were really important. Those moments define my
relationship with Santiago, and make it possible to understand what happened during
the five days of filming. Finally, there is a third reason, for me just as important as the
other two. The principal theme of Santiago was always the passage of time, memory and
the temptation to hold on, to invent strategies to arrest the disappearance of the world.
It was to this end that Santiago dedicated his whole life: understanding that work
involves having an awareness of time, of time passing and, ultimately, a consciousness
of death, that things end. When I filmed the original material I was just 30 years old.
And at 30, at least for me, the idea that things end was an abstract notion, an intellectual
construct. When I returned to the film, I was already more than 40. What was once an
idea had come to manifest itself in the body: you feel time gnawing at you from within,
running inside of you. When I reviewed the unedited footage, Santiago’s worries had
become my own. I had become someone able to understand what he was telling me.
‘If the film is unfinished.’ That’s a good question, and I don’t know how to
respond, because, you know, in editing there exist contrary approaches. I’m thinking
of Eduardo Escorel, who edited the film, together with myself and with Lı́via Serpa.
Escorel may be the best Brazilian film editor. He edited with Glauber Rocha and he
has edited many of the best Brazilian documentaries, Cabra marcado para morrer
(Eduardo Coutinho), for example. Escorel believes that, within any unedited footage,
there exists only a single possible film, the best film. The work of the editor would be
to comprehend which film that is. According to Escorel, I didn’t at first manage to edit
the film because, at the time, I wasn’t able to intuit the possible film that the unedited
142 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

footage contained. The possible film was the one I ended up making 13 years later.
I’m not sure I believe that. I’m not sure that in 10 years’ time I might not return to the
material and make another film, a new film. If that possibility exists, then no film
would ever be finished. There would always be the possibility to make other films, to
re-edit the footage. If you were of the school of Escorel, if you believe in a kind of
essentialism of the unedited footage, then there exists only one film, which is Santiago.
The other position allows you to imagine another six, eight, 10 films, each different.
I don’t know. The only thing I can tell you is, that if by ‘unfinished film’ you mean a
film that leaves more questions than answers, then Santiago is an unfinished film. That
has to do with the filmmaker I have become. As opposed to what I was, today I prefer
films that, ending, leave me more perplexed than certain. It is a consequence of my
observation that persons can’t be completely captured, that something always escapes,
flees, and I believe that documentary should take account of that, not have to maintain
the imperialist pretension of a total occupation of the territory. Santiago is an enigma,
he continues to be an enigma, and that doesn’t bother me, on the contrary.
ED/GN: In Santiago, you explore the possibility that Santiago, as a
character, continued acting as a servant. Nevertheless, the relationship of
superior –employee persists in the film. In fact, on various occasions we
see Santiago let slip negative commentaries on his experience as an
employee that are left aside. Is this something you had to take into
account when considering a second edition? Could one say that to a
certain extent Santiago is a documentary that in addition to being about
time reflects on silences and the unspoken?
Joao Moreira Salles: I think we’re talking about a documentary that was born under
the sign of an ambiguity that even I didn’t see at the time. It is there in the footage, and
yet, surprisingly, I only realized it much later. And I had watched the material
repeatedly. But, at the time, I could not see that there existed a relationship of
ambiguity that wasn’t only that of character/director, but also one of employ-
ee/employer. The ambiguity meant that neither of us, I as little as he, knew how to act
in front of the camera. In any case, I have the conviction that the film, as it is, born of an
ambiguous relationship of power, not understood by me, and not understood by him
either, produced a character who is much more alive, and a film that is more complex.
If I had made a film with absolute awareness of all the facts, I think it would only have
been a film about an exotic. That could even be interesting. But Santiago would be a
character far less rich than the character that emerged as a result of that
incomprehension. With what I now know, I would not have filmed in the same way,
and yet thank God I filmed as I did, because it made for a film with more layers, and
with a better chance of resisting time. That isn’t just good for the film but it’s good for
Santiago too. He exists more in this film than he would in any other, which is the best
you could hope for a character: that he resist, that he be memorable.
ED/GN: In your films in general there is a gradual and only partial
admission of your presence as the director. Beginning from a complete
absence in the first films and passing to the mention of your name as part
of the team of Entreatos, and to the narration in Santiago, your participation
is consistently elided. When you do appear, it’s with your back turned,
or your words are mediated by another’s voice. Similarly, your family
 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAO MOREIRA SALLES 143

history is avoided. You don’t dwell in these ‘personal’ areas. What would be
the reason for these choices, and why have you gradually changed as well?
Joao Moreira Salles: You know, my first work, when I was 24, 25 years old, was about
China. I made a series for Brazilian television about China. The following year, I directed
a series about the United States, called América, and immediately after, another about the
Blues, the American Blues. In that there was already something of Brazil, Black music.
Thus, in truth, it is a little like the trajectory of a nautilus in which I’m at the centre. I get
closer, closer, closer . . . . It is always easier to speak of that which is very different than to
speak of oneself, at least in my experience. The first known documentary is about an
Eskimo, made by an American. In the presentation of the exotic, of that which is
different, you can remain distant. As soon as you get closer to yourself, things begin to be
much more complicated. One of the problems with Santiago 13 years ago was exactly my
difficulty in comprehending that I was a character in the film. For me that was
unimaginable. And that lasted until last year. When I began to re-edit the film, I already
knew I was a character, but I thought that I could appear only in my interventions during
the filming. For a time, I maintained the illusion that the narration could be in the third
person. I tried, but it did not quite work out, the film continued to not work very well.
Until one day, the editor of the film, Eduardo Escorel, sent me an email. It was very
simple. It contained a single phrase of Chris Marker, the French documentary filmmaker.
He sent the phrase in English, not in French. It was already a translation. It went like this:
‘Contrary to what people say, using the first person in films tends to be a sign of humility. All I have
to offer is myself’. It’s a good phrase . . . . I’m not sure I agree with it. Often, the use of the
first person is not an act of humility. On the contrary, it can be an act of narcissism. Yet if
Marker wrote that, then he authorized me to use the first person. In the space of an hour,
the film was on its feet. It had found a structure. It was important that I present myself,
and that was impossible using only the unedited footage. In the end, I didn’t appear in the
film. I wasn’t filmed. My, let’s call it ‘mature’, presence as a man 13 years older than the
young man who filmed Santiago could only exist in the narration. Now, there is
something that you mentioned, which is very much related to the fact that today – and
this is no more than a personal path, because I don’t want to make any generalizations
with regard to documentary – I do not believe in the documentary that says: ‘This is the
world, here as I show it to you.’ In this sense, Santiago is rather a film about an encounter,
my encounter with a character. What passes into the film is not the totality of something
that is revealed. The documentary becomes rather a fragment of the world.
That said, there are certain things that always should be preserved, and one of them
is intimacy. There is a difference, which people sometimes have a certain difficulty in
recognizing, between intimacy and the private sphere. Intimacy has to do with affections,
with the relations of love between two people, between members of a family. Another
thing is the private sphere, family life, or the social life of a family, which doesn’t always
involve secrets, and doesn’t always involve affections. I think it is legitimate to explore
that sphere. In the case of Santiago, people in Brazil were surprised because I have always
been reticent in speaking of my personal life. When I made the film people said: ‘oh, so
you are revealing yourself . . . it is not as you had said’. I maintain that it is. What appears
in the film are the public aspects of a private household in its intersection with the social
life of the city. The nature of the relationship between my father and mother, of my
relationship with my parents, that is not in the film. On the other hand, even today,
I am not sure if I responded in the right way when Santiago told me he wanted to talk about
144 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

his sexuality. At the time, I judged that it would be an intrusion into the sphere, not of
privacy, but of intimacy. I felt it to be a very intimate aspect of his life, and I could not tell
whether he realized that he was speaking not only to me, but also to the public at large.
People don’t immediately realize what it means to speak to the camera. They believe they
are talking to a friend, but when they speak to the camera they are speaking to an audience,
to perfect strangers. He was 78 years old. I felt that it was something he might later regret.
Today, I have my doubts. He wanted to talk. I didn’t ask. It was not that I was being nosey,
prying at a secret. He wanted to talk about it. Maybe it was important for him to talk.
ED/GN: Santiago tacitly presents – this is an interpretation – a narrative
structure that contrasts the obsessive labour of Santiago and his desire to
narrate the lives of aristocratic families with the desire of the filmmaker to
tell the story of a minor character, someone who is liminal, and where the
famous family only appears narrated obliquely, almost as a phantom, in
the wanderings through the vacant family house. Up to what point and in
what sense is Santiago an exploration of the private memory of that public
family and what would be the function of the figure of the servant in that
elaboration?
Joao Moreira Salles: Good question. Listen . . . when I made the film . . . let’s go
back . . . I’m going to extend myself a bit. The house was built in the fifties, more
exactly in 1954. It was made for receptions. My father was a public figure. He was
a minister, an ambassador. The house was an extension of his public life. It had more
reception rooms than bedrooms. That very large residence had four bedrooms and
I think six reception rooms. From the point of view of the history of architecture in
modern Brazil, it is an important house. From the year it was inaugurated until the
mid-sixties, as it were, during the years of its apogee as a public residence, let’s say,
Brazil also was living a very particular moment. Those were notable years in Brazilian
life, years of great optimism: Brazil invented cinema novo, bossa nova; we were world
champions in soccer; there appeared monumental works in Brazilian literature, like
Grande Sertão: Veredas. Our architecture was amongst the most notable in the world.
Juscelino moved the capital to Brasilia, madness, yet madness full of ambition, which
gave the country the sensation that anything was possible. In the spheres of economic
life and social life, the house incarnated that daring, the ambition of Brazil in that
period. And it was a good ambition, it was an ambition that affirmed: ‘We can be part
of the world, we have, we are; we are not content to be only a periphery. We have
contributions to make in the realms of culture, in architecture. We are finally
becoming a relevant country.’ Through that house passed many protagonists of that
ambition. I didn’t live through much of that. When I filmed the house in 1993, it was
empty. My mother had already died. My father had withdrawn from political and
economic life, he was a retired gentleman, and Rio de Janeiro, my city, which in the
fifties had been the centre of Brazil, had lost its centrality. São Paulo had assumed that
position. Rio de Janeiro had entered into decadence. It had ceased to be the capital of
the Republic. It had ceased to be an important economic centre. When I filmed the
abandoned house, I imagined that it could represent that fall . . . . I hate allegory,
especially allegory in cinema, the man playing chess with death, those things. I find that
hateful, but at the time I was pretentious and believed that allegories could work: the
house, empty, abandoned, was the incarnation of that decadence of Brazil, of that
 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAO MOREIRA SALLES 145

diminution of ambition, of the end of the centrality of my family in Brazilian economic

and social life. Brazil had become something else in ’92, ’93. The people were in the
midst of the Collor de Melo presidency, inflation of 80% a month, Brazil had lost its
bearings, not knowing any longer what it wanted to be. So . . . what about the film? It
took the last guardian of memory, the ultimate witness, Santiago, and asked him to
inhabit the empty house with his words, with memory. The zenith remembered,
almost a phantom now, in contrast to the scenes of abandon. The present was
decadence. The past was grand: a nostalgic idea, and a conservative one, to which I no
longer subscribe. But at the time it was that which passed through my head. And of all
the people that had passed through that house, Santiago was the only one who
preserved the memory of its great moments. My father was never a nostalgic person.
He was always a man of the present. Santiago was different. For him the past was better
than the present. I was like that too. So, Santiago was a little like the spokesman of that
idea that Brazil had fallen on bad times, that Brazil had lost its way and lost its ambition.
Incidentally, the idea of the servant is curious because, in Brazil, it is very specific.
The domestic servant is the one who participates in the intimacy of the household without
being, himself, intimate with individual members. He is at once inside and an outsider.
He is ambiguous. As Santiago himself says, he ate the food of the patrons . . . he ate the
food of the family, but evidently he was not part of the family. Hence, his point of view
was perhaps the most interesting of all who lived in the house. He saw from within but he
wasn’t compromised, because he didn’t belong. He could be critical, ironic, sarcastic –
things that I could never be, neither I nor the other people in my family. For all these
reasons, he seemed to be the ideal character to narrate the story. I very seldom speak of
my father, and at the end of the film, when I mention that my father and my mother had
died, I speak of their deaths (and I only realized this later) with reference to Santiago. My
mother died some years before Santiago, my father a few years after. Santiago is the
referent. It is as if a character who has seen it all from backstage, at the end of the play
comes to centre stage and takes over the narrative in counterpoint. All of those who had
occupied the centre stage recede behind the curtain and they exist only in the voice of he
who now has the capacity to narrate. This is an interesting idea, it is curious. In Brazil,
you know, we have a great deal of difficulty in distinguishing impersonal, formal
relationships, from those that are personal. We are a country of ambiguous characters.
ED: O homem cordial?4
Joao Moreira Salles: It is ‘o homem cordial’. That’s it. Santiago, my relationship
with Santiago was a relationship permeated by that ambiguity. At the same time as I gave
him orders, each one contained sincere affection. And vice versa, he was a servant and he
liked me very much, in a very personal way. In the film, arrogance and affection exist in
an incomplete mixture, where you cannot distinguish which is one and which the other.
ED/GN: There is a phrase in Santiago, spoken by the narrator, which could
be linked to an actual creed of documentary film, which is ‘Everything
should be considered with a certain scepticism’. This imperative of
scepticism is shared by other contemporary directors in Argentina such as
Andrés Di Tella and Albertina Carri, and in Brazil by Sandra Kogut, for
example. And this is also something shared in the international panorama,
for example in the films of Jonas Mekas and Jonathan Caouette, for
example, which contain techniques that are associated with fiction as well.
146 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

Taking this into account, what do you think about the position of
documentary filmmakers today in relation to the search for the truth or a
certain kind of knowledge?
Joao Moreira Salles: Look, more and more I am becoming an uncertain person. I only
wish to talk about myself, about my partiality. I am very afraid of making generalizations.
It is true that the history of documentary film is marked by the curse of telling the great
truth. In a general way, the documentary took the path of the didactic film or the militant
film, à la Grierson, English social cinema, or the Soviet propaganda films. The filmmaker
determines which is the truth, and tells the public what they should think. Therefore,
there exists a current, in truth, the principal branch of documentary, which suffers from
that evil, of wanting to tell the truth. I am not a postmodern. I think that truth exists. It is
only that I am not certain that it is the object of documentary. It may be the object of
mathematics, of physics, of philosophy – who knows? – even journalism, but not of
documentary. Specifically in relation to Santiago, I did not make the film to inspire doubt.
I didn’t make a programmatic film so that the audience would doubt what they were
seeing. What happened? Thirteen years after filming, when I went to look at the images,
some of them were mysterious. I no longer knew what I had filmed. The uncertainty was
my own. When I look at the pool and the agitated surface of the water, I don’t know,
sincerely I don’t know, if that was the wind or a hand outside the frame. You know?
The conditions of production of Santiago, the fact that the images had been left 13 years in
a drawer, naturally produced scepticism, disbelief and doubt with respect to what I saw.
To this is added the inventive personality of Santiago. Santiago is a character that makes
things up. His imagination produced realities within his imagination. He is a character.
He is a little bit Borges. There are various people within Santiago, and there are various
authors you could invoke to explain him.
ED: He has something of Manuel Puig too.
Joao Moreira Salles: Certainly, and he has something of the Greeks as well. That idea
of invoking the names of persons, of making lists upon lists, Homer does that. The Iliad is
full of lists of soldiers, and ships. There is the idea that if you mention the name of a
person, that person doesn’t die. If you remember someone, they are still living. Santiago
closed his eyes and my house was no longer my house, my house was a Florentine palace.
The capacity to transform what you are seeing into another thing is a characteristic of his
very character. And to that you add the time that had passed, and my doubts regarding
what I had filmed. All of that combined with the fact that I had arrived at a point in my life
as a filmmaker when I ceased to find interest in speaking about what is true.
Returning to what I said at the beginning, the documentary filmmakers who interest
me today are not the ones that propose doubt as a method, as an artifice employed
because they have ceased to believe in truth . . . because truth exists. I like the
filmmakers who believe in the impossibility of closing a story. You never have
everything. What you have are fragments, and these fragments constitute a specific
reality. They are pieces of truth, written with a small ‘t’, rather than with a definitive
capital ‘T’. That’s why I like Mekas. And, purely by coincidence, the procedure
I followed in making Santiago is very similar to the procedure used by Mekas. I had not
intended to put the footage aside for 13 years. It just happened. I wasn’t able to edit the
film and so the footage was archived. I finally edited it 13 years later. Mekas has a system.
He films and then he saves the footage. He returns to it 13, 14 years later, and builds
 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAO MOREIRA SALLES 147

a narration in the present upon images of the past. This is exactly what happened in
Santiago. When Mekas does this, he offers you fragments of his life, not his whole life.
I could cite a number of documentary filmmakers I like, Eduardo Coutinho, without a
doubt. Tarnation by Jonathan Caouette I like a little less, because that the film is a bit too
deliberate. The programme of the film is to say: ‘I don’t believe what I am saying. I lie.’
Lies are less interesting than doubt.
ED/GN: Following documentaries like Entreatos and Noticias de uma
Guerra particular, Santiago seems to indicate a departure from your earlier
work, a new way of thinking about cinema and documentary less linked
to the political and with a stronger emphasis on the aesthetic. Would you
agree with this evaluation? And if such is the case, what would be the
fundamental marks of this change and what inspired you to film a
different kind of documentary? You spoke already of the contrast
between 13 years ago and today. This question is directed more towards
what could be read as a shift of interest, away from the political and social,
in this latest film, where those questions seem less urgent.
Joao Moreira Salles: Frederick Wiseman has a phrase – I don’t find much in
common with his films, but I recognize his competence – he says that all film should
happen between the screen and the spectator, in the middle of the road, a space which
no one controls, neither the spectator, nor the director. It signifies the following: that
the film be sufficiently ambiguous so that you, the spectator, can see in it one thing, and
your friend another. This kind of film is different, for example, from those of Michael
Moore, where as a viewer you can only accept or reject what you see because there is
no possible ambiguity. Therefore, your observation is a very good one. I understand
that someone could see in Santiago a shift of focus from the political to the aesthetic.
Inversely, it is also possible to encounter in Santiago reasons to think that it is a film that

FIGURE 2 Like its main character, the film Santiago is preoccupied with the work of
memory and storytelling. Here the ex-butler and amateur historian Santiago poses next to
his unpublished monumental genealogies of famous aristocratic families.
148 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

is even more political than Entreatos – to the extent that one of its foci is the question of
power. In the tradition of Brazilian documentary no one speaks of the dominant class,
there exists no film about the dominant class. Perhaps Santiago is the first. The equation
that defines almost all of Brazilian documentary cinema (in a way fictional cinema as
well, but certainly documentary) is the following: those who have filmed the world of
those who have not. It is the Griersonian matrix, films about street children, violence,
the northeastern sertão, the hungry, etc. In this sense, Santiago may be the first film to
open a window onto the dominant class, or even onto the relations that are established
between the dominant class and those it dominates, represented by Santiago. There
have been a very ideological reading of the film in Brazil. What most caught people’s
attention was the question of class, of power. In this sense, it would be possible to say
that the film generated more discussion than Entreatos, whose explicit object is politics.
In Santiago the topic, the surface of the film, is not politics, but it is possible to establish
a political reflection based on Santiago. From my point of view, that is not essential.
To answer the question: with time, in addition to having ceased to be a filmmaker who
controls, I have become interested less in the topic than in the treatment of the topic, in
form. A good part of documentary filmmakers believe that documentary is content.
Every time I go to a festival, even those dedicated specifically to documentary, what is
discussed is always the subject matter. It’s dull to return to the tired phrase that there is
no revolution of content without a revolution of form, but if you follow the history of
documentary you will see that at each turning point, what was broken was the form,
never the content. I believe, therefore, that to do politics in a documentary you have to
pay attention to the form, not the theme. And that for me today is essential. Santiago is
a film in which I basically consider the form, what I want to discuss is the form.
Discussing the form I can say to you: ‘Consider how the documentary is made,
consider how you should position yourselves before that which you see, consider if you
can have faith in what you are seeing, consider if you should believe what I tell you.’ All
of that can be profoundly political, and is related to form. Documentary is not merely
content; it is also, and perhaps mainly, a way of narrating it.
ED/GN: Don’t you think that documentary today is turning in that
direction? We could argue that since fiction doesn’t leave much room for
experimentation, it is the documentary that has come to occupy that space.
Joao Moreira Salles: Historically, among the cinematographic forms, the
documentary always was the genre that experimented most. First of all, for pragmatic
reasons: it is cheaper. When you err, it costs less because you employ fewer people, and
less money. Therefore, the freedom to experiment is greater. The most radical films
of the twenties are documentaries, Dziga Vertov, Berlin, amongst others. In a way, this
lasts until today. I believe that the most surprising contemporary films are
documentaries. Fiction found a canonical form of narration and what you have are
better and worse films. It is increasingly rare to encounter films that revolutionize the
form of narration. I think that the documentary still has that pretension, that capacity.
Now, that is also a danger, because it can turn into a mannerism. To always show the
manner in which a film is made, to reveal the act of filming, all of that has become rather
commonplace, become a cliché. That formal decision requires reasoning behind it. And
its integration into the film should respond to an internal necessity, within the film. Even
 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAO MOREIRA SALLES 149

so, I think that documentary is still the most vital part of cinema. Rather, it’s not that I
think so. It is my conviction.
ED/GN: There is another question that has a certain relation to the
previous one. Beyond the differences that you see between the first films
(where you seek to control) and Santiago, is there a similar undercurrent
traversing all your films? Or do you find the difference to be radical?
Joao Moreira Salles: I think that . . . you know that thing . . . it’s like this: you have
ABC, then you have BCD, then you have CDE, then you have DEF. It seems that DEF
is radically different from ABC, that there is no common element, yet basically what
you have is a progression. Today I am at a very different place than I was at the start.
If you eliminate the intermediary stages, in fact, it would appear there is nothing in
common. Yet there exists a trajectory, because I didn’t leap from there to here
directly. I progressed gradually and arrived at a different place. If you eliminate the
space between, you won’t encounter any relation between Santiago and the first things
I did. But if you were to follow my path, you will naturally arrive at the place where I
am now. Therefore, ABC is América, China, Blues, it is cinema à la Grierson, narration
in the third person. Consider the ambition: ‘that’s China’, ‘that’s America’, ‘that’s
Blues’, etc. Therefore, I’m getting closer to Brazil. In Brazil I can’t make those
affirmations, which are so peremptory. People know what I’m talking about. I can say
to a Brazilian ‘That’s China’ because he doesn’t know so much about China. But when
I arrive at Brazil, I have to be more prudent. The first thing I do is eliminate the
narration. I let the film show itself. Narration, when it exists, is more factual, and less

FIGURE 3 Notı́cias de una guerra particular was the first documentary film to show the
unseen world of urban violence in today’s Brazil. Here a drug dealer from a youth gang
speaks to the camera with his face covered.
150 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

assertive. When you eliminate the narration, you continue to affirm that the world is as
you see it, but not in such a definitive way. Notı́cias de uma Guerra particular is already a
film without closure. It is a film that doesn’t present any solution. It says only: ‘this is
the problem; the solution to the problem: I don’t know what it is’. The film ends a bit
in a cul-de-sac, in a dead end, which is different from those first films where I present a
closed narrative. Thus, when I was at ABC, I knew; here, at BCD, I am no longer
certain. Then you get to Nelson Freire, a film made completely of absences, of things that
are unspoken. There isn’t a phrase that is completed. Everything is left unsaid. After
that came Entreatos. The idea in Entreatos was to eliminate all political rhetoric, that is,
all that had occurred during Lula’s public appearances and political rallies during the
campaign. The public appearances were filmed, but none of that appears in the film.
What appear are the private scenes in which Lula doesn’t speak of certainties. Entreatos
is a film made up of unimportant moments: in the elevator, in the car, the hotel, the
airline hanger, the trips between one rally and another. Lula takes a 40-minute boat
trip between two capitals in the Brazilian Amazon region. In one city, he speaks before
80 thousand people, in the other, Belém, for 200 thousand. Many of them cry, they
shout. They feel that they are before History itself. If the next day you were to ask Lula
what happened the day before, he’d talk about the rallies, never about the trip, about
the ferry. Travel is dead time, time that is thrown away. When included in the film,
these sequences acquire life because they become part of a structure that gives them
relevance. It is the film that gives them life. The inverse of this would be the following:
any image of those rallies that unite 200 thousand people would be necessarily less than
the experience of being there, breathing that air, participating in that moment. It’s like
filming soccer. The image is always less powerful than the packed stadium. Or like
filming carnaval, something that Orson Welles tried and failed to do. He intended to
film carnaval in Rio de Janeiro and on the second day he quit and went to film fishermen
in Ceará, which is much easier. Some things are too big to be registered by a camera.
When included on film, it is never simply a recording of reality. It is reality minus one,
a lesser potentiality of the real. The manner I found to solve this problem was to always
use the dead times, the times not lived as important. That would be the lesson of direct
cinema. The corollary of this procedure is that we eliminate from the film all certainty,
all affirmative assertions, precisely those things that are said at a rally.
Returning then to ABC and DEF: ABC, absolute certainty; DEF, absolute doubt,
and in the middle, the path. I go shedding certainties, gaining doubts. I think that
I became a filmmaker of some interest after Nelson Freire. Before that, none of it is very
important. What happens is that there at least I began to think. Until Noticias de uma
Guerra particular I was thinking very little, despite the fact that it was a film that had so
much impact, maybe because it was the first to treat urban violence in Brazil, the urban
violence of the nineties. Notı́cias has the virtue of being pioneering, but as a film I don’t
find it very interesting. The form is conventional, nothing more than a report. From
Nelson Freire on there exists the critical consideration of a filmmaker in action, which
makes the result more interesting as documentary.
ED/GN: In relation to influences, how do you situate your production or
how do you see yourself personally within the context of Brazilian or
Latin American cinema? Are the legacies of cinema novo and the tradition
of documentary points of reference for your work?
 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAO MOREIRA SALLES 151

FIGURE 4 Santiago incorporates unedited material that was not originally to be

included in the film.

Joao Moreira Salles: Look, when I began to direct documentaries at the end of the
eighties, I didn’t know anything. If you had mentioned people like Grierson or
Flaherty, it would have been news to me. That’s the story of my generation. For my
generation, cinema was no longer central. We didn’t discuss cinema. I started to make
cinema without really knowing what cinema was. Therefore, my influences were not
from cinema but from non-fiction literature. I was very influenced by certain
journalists such as Lillian Ross, Joseph Mitchell and, in a way, Truman Capote. These
people taught me more about how to approach reality than documentary cinema,
which I didn’t know. At the end of the eighties documentary cinema was not accessible
in Brazil. You couldn’t go and see one. I simply didn’t know the classic films. Beginning
in the mid-nineties I became good friends with Coutinho. In terms of form, my cinema
is not so influenced by his. But the long conversations I have had with him over the
years have left a very strong mark. He is one of my best friends. With him I learned that
documentary needs to be considered, and from within, not from without, not just the
content but how you narrate a topic. That I learned with him. Another influence
arrived in the mid-nineties, when I finally had access to American direct cinema. It was
shocking to see the films of Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers, that group.
ED: Entreatos has something of that, doesn’t it?
Joao Moreira Salles: It does, yes. I don’t believe – for that matter many filmmakers
of direct cinema don’t either – in the objectivity of the camera, in the idea that the
camera does not alter reality. In that respect, the positions of Jean Rouch appear far less
disingenuous. He says that it is not a matter of truth or theatre, but of truth and
theatre. The two things happen at the same time, and are not exclusive. But the idea
of observing is powerful, and I learned this from direct cinema. Brazilian documentary
cinema influenced me very little. It was a cinema which had political importance, but
not aesthetic. It is different from what happened with fictional cinema. In a way, the
importance of Brazilian documentary was greater for fiction. Cinema novo would not
152 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

have existed without the impulse provided by documentary. Contrary to Argentine

cinema, the great Brazilian fictional cinema has documentary DNA. The idea of taking
to the streets, of filming with natural light, of not having a studio, of not having a set, of
using semi-professional actors, small teams, etc. It is a mixture of neo-realism and
documentary. All the great Brazilian films, Pixote (Héctor Babenco), the films of
Glauber Rocha, all the way to Central do Brasil and Cidade de Deus, all those films, their
power is in the real, the documentary’s gift to Brazilian fictional cinema. Many of those
filmmakers made documentary first. Only that, in documentary, they adopted a
traditional form. Formally, Brazilian documentary was always very conservative.
The ones making films didn’t understand that it was necessary to revolutionize the
form. It was a very political cinema, very militant, principally during the sixties, but it
aged very fast. Those films had historical importance. They were the first to show
things that had not been filmed before, but as documentaries, formally, they are not so
important. I think that Brazilian documentary only gains its own language, a unique
form of narration in the mid-nineties. I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about
Coutinho, about the people who invented a new way of narration.
ED: Who else, for instance?
Joao Moreira Salles: Sandra Kogut has made very interesting films. As have the
filmmakers in the group Olhar Eletrônico, like Fernando Meirelles, Marcelo Tas. These
filmmakers have also done excellent work for television, documentaries that have broken
with the norms of TV. There is a very original school from Minas Gerais, Cao Guimarães,
Lucas Bambozzi, Eder Santos. Today there is a significant group of Brazilians doing new
things in documentary. Santiago is part of this. Not only because it focuses on the
dominant class but also because, formally, it is different from other films being made in
Brazil. I think that today, Brazilian non-fiction cinema can influence new generations of
filmmakers. Before it was more difficult. The form was too conventional, which is not to
say that certain films don’t deserve a place in history, but the formal conventionality of
most Brazilian films made them unlikely referents for future filmmakers . . . . There are
exceptions, of course, Wladimir Carvalho, Geraldo Sarno, Arnaldo Jabor . . . and there
are others. For some time, documentary was a stage on the way to fictional cinema, which
was what many filmmakers really wanted to do. Today there is a large group of
filmmakers who primarily make documentary. They might make a fiction film, but they
consider themselves essentially documentary filmmakers. Another person who ought to
be mentioned is Jorge Furtado, who has made exceptional documentaries.
GN: What is your next project?
Joao Moreira Salles: Right now, I am editing the magazine Piauı́, and I am totally
dedicated to that. It is a non-fiction magazine. It includes fiction and poetry but it is
principally a magazine of journalism. I contribute with articles. I did something similar to
Entreatos, only this time, with ex-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Instead of
filming, I wrote. I spent 20 days with him on tour. We began in the United States, in
Brown University, and travelled to Little Rock (Arkansas), Chapel Hill (North Carolina),
and then to Europe as well. It was a picture of Fernando Henrique outside of Brazil.
In a way, I continue to make documentaries, only of a different kind. I plan to return
to filmmaking, eventually. Santiago was very different from my prior films and I decided
that I didn’t want to go back to what I had been doing before. Therefore, I have to take
some time to consider. My next film will certainly be a documentary, but it will have
 AN INTERVIEW WITH JOAO MOREIRA SALLES 153

to somehow introduce a layer of fiction. I see a possible path in the films of Chris Marker,
in the film-essay. I have an idea, but I’m not sure as yet if anything will come of it.
ED: No straight fiction . . . ?
Joao Moreira Salles: No, straight fiction, no.
ED: Never?
Joao Moreira Salles: I don’t know about never [laughter], but I don’t plan on it . . . .

Notes
1 This interview was carried out in Princeton, New Jersey, in October 2007.
2 See entry for Joao Moreira Salles, written by José Carlos Avellar, in Cine documental en
América Latina, edited by Paulo Antonio Paranaguá. Madrid: Cátedra, 2003.
3 Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. The Evidence of Film. Abbas Kiarostami. Paris: Yves Gevaert
Éditeur: 44.
4 ‘O homem cordial’ (the ‘cordial’ or ‘gentle man’) is an anthropological concept
coined by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in his seminal work Raı́zes do Brasil (1936) to
explain Brazilian modern identity. According to Buarque de Holanda, most Brazilians
respond to the social psychology of the ‘homem cordial’, who consistently confounds
the private world with the public sphere.

Edgardo Dieleke is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Languages and Cultures at Princeton University, USA. He has published several essays
on the Latin American documentary film tradition and the so-called new Latin American
cinema. He is currently editing the book Peronismo: polı́ticas culturales, together with
Claudia Soria and Paola Cortés Rocca. In his dissertation he is working on current
representations of violence in Argentine and Brazilian literature and cinema, and the
intersection of fictional and non-fictional narratives.

Gabriela Nouzeilles (Licenciatura, University of Buenos Aires; PhD University of

Michigan) is Professor in Latin American Studies at Princeton University. Before joining
Princeton University in 2003, she taught at Nottimghan University (UK), Trinity College
(CT), and Duke University. She specializes in modern Latin American literature and
culture, cultural and critical theory, science and fiction, and travel literature. Her articles
have appeared in MLN, Revista Iberoamericana, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies,
Revista de Crı́tica Literaria Latinoamericana, and LALR. She was founding editor and
Executive Editor from 1999 to 2003 of the interdisciplinary journal Nepantla: Views from
South (Duke University Press). Her book Ficciones somáticas: Naturalismo, nacionalismo y
polı́ticas médicas del cuerpo (Viterbo, 2000) studies the interplay of medical and literary
narratives of disease in postcolonial Argentina. She is the editor of The Argentina reader:
History, culture, and politics (Duke 2003), and La naturaleza en disputa: Retóricas del cuerpo
y el paisaje (Paidós 2002). Her new book, Of other places: Patagonia and the production of
nature (Duke University Press, forthcoming), studies the production of natural space and
heterotopic thinking in modern times.